LAST week I wrote of President Obama’s roots in Offaly.
What I forgot to mention was that George Bush was descended from another leader, none other than Strongbow.
After Richard de Clare’s soldiers invaded Ireland at the behest of Dermot MacMurrough, the king of Leinster in 1169, they demanded their reward. MacMurrough duly handed over his daughter Aoife. Renowned for her beauty, Aoife was swiftly married to the Norman De Clare, aka Strongbow.
For generations, the De Clare clan continued to marry ‘well’, aligning themselves with aristos throughout Ireland and England. In the 16th century, the De Clares met the English branch of George W Bush’s family tree in the strange figure of Anne Marbury Hutchinson.
The daughter of an Anglican priest in Lincolnshire, Hutchinson travelled to America in 1634, where she subsequently led a rebellion against the repressive religious rules of the Massachusetts Bay colony.
Annie had her own interpretation of the Bible — she believed that faith alone could get you there, so never bother about religious obedience.
Talk like that soon got her banished from the colony.
In a further odd twist of fate she settled in New York, where she was killed by Native Americans in 1643.
Hutchinson’s descendants married into the Bush family in the 19th century.
By 1907, Samuel Prescott Bush, who made his fortune in the railroads, was president of the Buckeye Steel Castings Company in Columbus, Ohio.
His son, Prescott Bush, born in Ohio in 1895, was a Wall Street banker and later a senator for Connecticut. Prescott’s son, George Herbert Walker Bush, born in 1924, would confirm the family’s place in American politics.
The rest, as they say, is hanging chads and mangled English.
Still, George Dubya will surely go down in history as the man who so very succinctly said: “The French are always there when they need you.”